While the discovery of authors from around the world usually unfolds like a big whole story made of different chapters, often quite autonomous but at the same time connected in some ways, i mainly bump in Italian photographers by mere chance and/or often without any kind of link between the paths that lead me to one or to the other. This is still a mistery i didn't manage to solve, probably simply due to some scarce connection from my side with the 'Italian photographic world', combined with the usual difficulty in trying to trace an Italian scene through the web, which is still used with great diffidence by the many.So I have to thank Marco Signorinifor having written to me and for having allowed me to know his beautiful work, made of quiet and silent visions, where timeless landscapes alternate with an intense environmental portraiture, leaving us with the warm feeling of perpetually witnessing those very last moments that prelude to a mid-summer sunset.Images from his work Earth will be on show during the new edition of Fotografia Europea - Reggio Emilia, starting on April 30.

The work Coreographien by Mona Breede made me immediately think about other passers-by based works. Her digitally assembled images have strictly framed spaces that she subsequently fills with human presence, creating a peculiar feeling of stillness, a frozen time that has nothing to do with any decisive moment or has no snapshot-like flavour: on the contrary, it slows time to show the structure of these ever-changing moments of street life, almost transforming them into icons of our cities, bathed in an artificial light that is far from the glimpses of city life we can record with our own eyes.

Other works played with the codes of the street photography tradition, in order to deviate them towards a contemplative approach that rather than freezing a moment, it could expand a single second into an indefinite lapse of time, allowing us to explore those same scenes we are used to look at like stolen moments. So let’s take this chance to go back to classics of this subgenre, from the streets scenes restaged by Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca di Corcia to the ‘unconscious’ passers-by’s faces taken by Beat Streuli.

In 1977, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan's book Evidenceset a landmark in the investigation of the photographic image, showing how dramatic the gap between an image and the perception of it can be, leaving the viewer in front of the immediacy of signs that can be clearly perceived but give no chance of being composed in a clear and shared meaning.From then on, many went deeper in exploring the power of deceiving that is hidden inside the photographic language, questioning our gaze and our understanding: the latest attempt is probably Mårten Lange's last book, Anomalies (published by Farewell Books), a sequence of objects and scenes that gives us no clues about their meaning, leaving us with a subtly dreadful feeling of what may have just happened or will happen soon, immersed in a clinical black & white that owes much to the mysterious objectivity of Sultan and Mandel's collection of 'documents'. In both works almost everything is exposed, flash lights bare every surface and so our discomfort, instead of coming from what we can't see, is enhanced by the fact that we are actually seeing everything, we are seeing too much, with no chance of grasping the sense of what is in front of us.